


Debriefing

by Cybra



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode Related, Feels, Gen, Shipping If You Squint, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 18:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15225198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cybra/pseuds/Cybra
Summary: SPOILERS for "From the Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22!"Following every SHUSH mission had always been a debriefing.  While this wasn't an actual SHUSH assignment, Scrooge and Beakley still needed to talk.





	Debriefing

**Author's Note:**

> I have something more in the vein of a story where Scrooge clung to the only people who’d chosen to stay with him bouncing around my head, but I wanted to write two things that were actually canon-based ever since “From the Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22!” aired, so here’s the first of those ideas.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** _Ducktales_ belongs to the Walt Disney Company.

Beakley knew just where to find Scrooge when he wanted to be completely alone and let his walls down.  She knew her employer and former partner as well as if not better than he knew himself.  Well over a century of life had encouraged him to form patterns of behavior like well-traveled trails in the woods.   Once you got past all his bluster and knew what to look for, it wasn’t too hard to predict what he might do as she’d discovered during their adventures with SHUSH.

Tonight, however, he surprised her.  Oh, she knew he’d be sitting on a stone bench somewhere—Killmotor Hill was littered with them in various places—but he wasn’t in some secluded part of the Hill.  Instead, he sat there on the edge of the large vegetable, fruit, and herb garden that had been first sowed back in World War II as a victory garden.  He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there staring at the ground off to one side of the bench.  It left her plenty of room to sit.

She took the obvious invitation, sitting down beside him.

“I made a mess of things,” Scrooge said softly, not looking at her but obviously intending her to hear. “I _keep_ making a mess of things.  This time’s not quite…Spear of Selene…bad but still bad.  She was right here the whole time, but I wasn’t, not really.”

Beakley didn’t need to ask for specifics.  Once they’d found their rhythm back in SHUSH, the pair had almost never needed to say out loud more than half of their conversations, knowing on an almost instinctual level what the other was thinking.  “I could’ve pushed her on you to break you out of it.”

“But you knew I’d shove her away,” Scrooge countered, closing his eyes. “And you knew I’d hurt her when I did.  I _still_ hurt her in the end.”

“You hurt her less this way,” she reassured him.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”  He sighed.  “She spent her whole life studying me, and I spent it…doing what?  Focusing on business deals that didn’t really mean anything to me anymore?  Wallowing over not having my blood kin around despite you insisting that I at least _try_ to talk to them?”

She said nothing in response for there was nothing that _could_ be said.  Instead, she leaned slightly towards him so that he could meet her halfway if he chose to.

After a moment’s hesitation, he did, and she hoped he got some comfort from the contact.  It was just something they’d started doing after a particularly hard mission that had become habit, a mute reminder that they weren’t alone no matter how rough things that they could tell no one else about could get.  Neither kept a tally on who was drawing from who’s strength during these moments, each knowing that one day they’d need to lean on the other just as much as their partner was leaning on them now.

This was part of the reason she hadn’t pushed Webby on him: to protect him just as much as it was to protect her granddaughter.  Scrooge had already been in the process of being eaten alive by his own guilt and sorrow; yelling at Webby to leave him alone and making her cry would’ve made him feel infinitely worse and further hasten the death spiral he’d been on for the past ten years.

Still, there was no denying the deep-seated guilt that radiated out from him now, particularly when he murmured softly, “How she doesn’t hate me, I’ll never know.”

That Beakley had a response to: “Because even though she doesn’t remember it, you were the one who answered her crying when I couldn’t reach her fast enough.”

For a man who had claimed he hadn’t cared one way or another about the child living in his house, he’d always appear when baby Webby had needed someone.  Beakley had caught him both holding her and hovering in the doorway depending on who had reached the little one first.  He had phased out the behavior by the time she’d become a toddler, but it had been there and had given Beakley some hope that the man she knew best hadn’t completely given up.

Her response gave Scrooge pause, and she could practically hear the self-recrimination playing in his head doing the same.  Really, no one could hate Scrooge McDuck more than Scrooge McDuck.

“I still barely know her,” he said at last.

“You’ll learn,” she assured him before giving him an amused smile. “At least you don’t have over a century to catch up on.”

That prompted him to chuckle.  “Tell me more about her?  I know her favorite color is pink, her favorite drink is juice, her favorite booby trap is spike pits, and her favorite storm is tropical cyclone meets thunder snow, but that’s about it.”

“That’s a good start,” she praised.  (After all, it was significantly more than he had known before Black Heron’s return.)  She straightened up. “Let me go get the basket, and you can help me with the garden while we talk.”

He sat up as well before rising from the bench as she did.  “Aye.  I’d like that.”

Beakley turned and began to walk towards the door leading to the kitchen before she stopped and looked back at him.  A soft smile like the one that had overtaken her face as Scrooge and Webby re-introduced themselves on the sub spread across her beak.  “I know I haven’t said this before, but it’s good to see the old you again, Scrooge.”

For a moment, his expression was the very definition of surprise.  Then it morphed into a small, sad smile of his own.  “Thank you, Bentina.”


End file.
